Successful French documentary filmmaker of Senegalese origin Alice Diop won European critics with her debut feature film and not only won the second most valuable Silver Lion award in Venice, i.e. the grand prize of the jury, but she was also nominated for European director of the year for this court drama. The style of this court drama also shows that Diop comes from the world of documentary, and she filmed “Saint Omer” inspired by a trial she followed in 2016 in the town of the same name in the north of France. And it was one of those gruesome and horrifying cases because in it a woman who, like the director, is a French woman of Senegalese origin, was accused of murdering an infant.
She left him on the beach to drown, and during the trial this woman claimed that some evil forces forced her to kill her daughter. Thus, the film’s main character, literature professor and writer Rama (Kayije Kagame), a French woman of Senegalese origin and four months pregnant, will head from Paris to the town of Saint-Omer for the trial of young Laurence, who is accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter. Rama’s idea is to use the details of the trial to write a modern variation of the myth about probably the most famous child-mother (what a stupid word!) from Greek mythology, Medea. Although what Laurence did is not only unimaginable, completely incomprehensible and unforgivable, listening to her life story and the circumstances that led her to kill her child, Rama seems to begin to feel a connection with this unfortunate woman.
A lot of things from their lives seem to coincide and a lot of what Laurence experienced from early childhood, through growing up in Senegal and coming to France to study and later, will remind Rama of what she herself went through. Primarily, this will refer to their relationships with their mothers and the fear that she will be the same kind of mother as hers was, not excessively interested and caring, and Laurence was obviously in a similar situation. Although almost the entire action of “Saint Omer” takes place in the courtroom where we follow the details of this painful trial, Diop recorded a powerful and poignant drama, and she managed to make the viewer see Laurence the same way she apparently saw her.
A woman who is both the perpetrator of a terrible crime and also a victim, and although it may sound grotesque and unimaginable, in the end you have to feel empathy towards her. Perhaps at first the film in which we almost exclusively listen to the testimony during the trial, the script of which was written according to the court minutes, may sound incredibly dry and monotonous, but Diop managed to film an impressive, complex and deep drama in which the themes include motherhood, racial relations, but also experience African immigrant women in France. Women born in Africa where the state of mind is certainly different from the European one and where tribalism, shamanism and magic are clearly still deeply etched in people’s consciousness.
And while Laurence claims during the trial that some dark forces conspired against her, that someone cursed her at home and performed some kind of magic act, not only the judge, but also everyone else during the proceedings must look at such claims with scorn. What magic, evil eyes and stupidity, anyone normal will think, and maybe it is easier for Laurence herself to believe that she did such an inconceivable act in her right mind, but it is easier for her to explain it with magic. And while in recent years a veritable scourge of true crime films and series have spilled over from America to the rest of the world, often filmed in an exploitative, sensationalist way, “Saint Omer” is the exact opposite of all that. A deep, even philosophical court drama in which Diop only seemingly coldly states the facts of a terrible case, and what we saw stays with us for a long time and prompts us to think.